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“Oh,” Sarah says, losing interest. “Like Rachel, you mean.”
“Yeah,” I say, my heart sinking, for some reason. “Like Rachel.”
Is that really true?Does Cooper like women like Rachel—women whose handbags match their shoes? Women who understand what PowerPoint is, and know how to use it? Women who eat their salad with the dressing on the side, and can do hundreds of sit-ups without getting out of breath? Women who went to Yale? Women who shower instead of bathe, the way I do, because I’m too lazy to stand up that long?
Before I have a chance to really think about it, Rachel comes ru
“I was upstairs with one of the investigators,” I say. It’s even true. Sort of. “They needed to get into the dead girl’s room—”
“Oh,” Rachel says, losing interest. “Well, now that you’re back, could you call counseling services and see if they can see someone right away? Roberta’s roommate is in a state—”
I perk right up.
“Sure,” I say, reaching for my phone, my promise to Cooper that I would quit playing Murder, She Wrote promptly forgotten. “No problem. You want someone to walk her over there?”
“Oh, yes.” Rachel may have been dealing with a tragedy, but you would never have known it to look at her. Her Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress clings to her lithe figure in all the right places, and none of the wrong ones (the way wrap dresses do on me) and there are bright spots of color in her cheeks. “Do you think you can find someone?”
“I’d be happy to help,” I say.
Sure, I feel a twinge of guilt as I say it. I mean, that my willingness to lend a hand has more to do with a desire to question the dead girl’s roommate than actually to help her.
But not enough to stop myself.
I call counseling services. Of course they’ve already heard about “the second tragedy,” so they tell me to bring the roommate, Lakeisha Green, right over. One of my job responsibilities is personally to escort students who’ve been referred to counseling services to the building that houses it, because once a student who was sent over by herself got lost on the way and ended up in Washington Heights wearing her bra on her head and insisting that she was Cleopatra.
Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.
Lakeisha is sitting in a corner of the cafeteria under a kitten poster Magda had hung on the wall to brighten the place up, since, as Magda puts it, antique stained glass windows and mahogany wainscoting are just plain “ugly on the eye.” Magda is there, too, trying to coax Lakeisha into eating some Gummi Bears.
“Just a few?” Magda is saying, as she dangles a plastic bag full of them in front of Lakeisha’s face. “Please? You can have them for free. I know you like them, last night you bought a bag with your friends.”
Lakeisha—just to be polite, you can tell—takes the bag. “Thank you,” she murmurs.
Magda beams, then, when she notices me, whispers, “My poor little movie star. She won’t eat a thing.”
Then, in an even lower voice, Magda asks, “Who was that man Pete and I saw you with today, Heather? The handsome one?”
“That was Cooper,” I say, since I’ve told Magda all about Cooper… as one does, naturally, discuss hotties over sloppy joes on one’s lunch break.
“That was Cooper?” Magda looks aghast. “Oh, honey, no wonder—”
“No wonder what?”
“Oh, never mind.” Magda pats me on the arm in a gesture that would have been comforting if I hadn’t, you know, been terrified of being poked by one her nails. “It will turn out all right. Maybe.”
“Uh, thanks.” I’m not at all sure what she was talking about… or that I wanted to know. I turn my attention to Roberta Pace’s roommate.
Lakeisha looks really, really sad. Her hair is done up in braids all over her head, and at the end of each braid is a brightly colored bead. The beads click together whenever Lakeisha moves her head.
“Lakeisha,” I say, gently. “I understand you have an appointment to speak to someone at counseling services. I’m here to walk you there. Are you ready to go?”
Lakeisha nods. But she doesn’t stand up. I glance at Magda.
“Maybe she wants a rest,” Magda says. “Does my little movie star want a rest?”
Lakeisha hesitates a moment. Then she says, “No, it’s okay. Let’s go.”
“You sure you don’t want a DoveBar?” Magda asks. Because DoveBars are, actually, the solution to nearly every problem in the universe.
But Lakeisha just shakes her head, causing her hair beads to rattle musically.
Which is surely how she stays so ski
Our walk out of the building is slow-paced and somber. They are letting students back into the building a few at a time, with the warning that they’ll have to use the stairs to get to their rooms. As one might expect in such a small community, word of another death has spread fast, and when the students see Lakeisha and me leaving the building together, there is a lot of whispering—“That’s the roommate,” I hear, and someone else responding, “Oh, poor thing.” Lakeisha either doesn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it. She walks with her head held high, but her gaze lowered.
We’re standing on the street corner, waiting for the crossing sign to change, when I finally get the courage to bring up what I want to know.
“Lakeisha,” I say. “Do you know if Roberta had a date last night?”
Lakeisha looks over at me like she’s seeing me for the first time. She’s a tiny little thing, all cheekbones and knees. The little bag of Gummi Bears Magda had pressed on her, and which she still carries, seems to be weighing her down.
She says, “Excuse me?” in a soft voice.
“Your roommate. Did she have a date last night?”
“I think so. I don’t really know,” Lakeisha replies, in an apologetic whisper that’s hard to hear above the sound of all the traffic. “I went out last night—I had dance rehearsal at eight. Bobby was asleep by the time I got back. It was real late, after midnight. And she was still asleep when I went down to breakfast this morning.”
Bobby. Had they been close, Lakeisha and her Ziggy-loving roommate? They must have been, if she’d called her Bobby. What am I doing, interrogating the poor girl this way, after she’s had such a shock?
Is Jordan right? About what he’d accused me the other day. Had I turned hard?
I guess so, since next thing I knew, I was trying again.
“The reason I ask, Lakeisha—” I feel like a total and complete heel. Maybe it’s all right, you know, if you feel like a jerk. Know what I mean? I mean, I’ve read that crazy people—sorry, I mean mentally disturbed people—never consider themselves mentally disturbed. So maybe real jerks never consider themselves jerks. So the fact that I feel like a jerk means that I couldn’t possibly be one…
I’ll have to remember to ask Sarah.
“The reason I ask is that the police”—slight lie, but oh well—“the police found a used condom under Roberta’s bed this morning. It was, uh, pretty fresh.”
This seems to clear a little of the fog out of Lakeisha’s head. She looks at me, and this time, I can tell she really sees me.
“Excuse me?” she asks, in a stronger voice.
“A condom. Under Roberta’s bed. It had to have been from last night.”
“No way,” Lakeisha says, firmly. “There is no way. Not Bobby. She’s never—” She breaks off and studies her Nikes. “No,” she says, again, and shakes her head with such force that the beads on the ends of her braids click like castanets.
“Well, someone had to have left that condom,” I say. “If it wasn’t Roberta, who—”
“Oh my God” Lakeisha suddenly interrupts, with actual excitement in her voice. “It had to be Todd!”
“Who’s Todd?”
“Todd is the man. Bobby’s man. The new man. Bobby never had a man before.”